Owners get creative to keep cars on track

DAYTONA BEACH — For sale: One hood on a Porsche GT3 Grand-Am series race car.

Includes the name of your company on the hood, which will be seen by millions of TV viewers watching the Rolex 24 Hours endurance race this weekend. Also includes shirts, hats, jackets, passes to the pits during the race, and an introduction to the five drivers who are racing the Porsche with your hood on it: Former NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Bobby Labonte, stock car driver Tim George, and renowned road racing specialists Timo Bernhard, Romain Dumas and Spencer Pumpelly.

If the car wins its class — and it very well could, as this team is the defending champion — you will be sprayed with champagne in victory lane.

And that's not all: Call today and as a special bonus, you can place your company's sticker as an associate sponsor on Labonte's Sprint Cup car that will run in the Daytona 500.

Price: $125,000. Contact Kevin Buckler, owner of the Porsche. And after the race, if you want the hood to hang on your wall, Buckler says that might be arranged.

That's how easy it is to become a sponsor of a major race team in the Grand-Am series in the biggest endurance race in the country. And if you prefer the NASCAR Sprint Cup series, or even the Camping World truck series, California-based Buckler will gladly return your calls. Buckler is the owner of The Racer's Group, which is fielding not only five cars in the Rolex 24 Hours, but at least one Sprint Cup car this season for Labonte and possibly a teammate to be named later.

He also fields teams in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.

That's how Buckler makes a living: Assembling quality race teams, hiring good drivers, then hoping sponsors step up to support him. Buckler is a marketing whiz, who rounded up more than a dozen friends and business associates to invent in his NASCAR Sprint Cup team, which this season is about to begin its second year.

And what does that cost? "A full season of sponsoring a competitive Cup team costs about $12 million," he says. And the reason why Buckler wants a second Cup team, and maybe a third, is that once you've bought a lot of the equipment for one team, you can use it on additional teams, and the cost of that second team comes way down.

So, maybe, $20 million for two cars?

"Less than that, probably," Buckler says. "Maybe quite a bit less." Which is one reason the top Cup teams, like Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports, run the maximum-allowed four cars in each race.

If it sounds easy, be aware that is never has been, and certainly isn't during a recession.

"Finding sponsors now is harder than it was last year," Buckler says. Perhaps harder than it has ever been. Forbes just published a story titled "Sports Sponsorships Hit The Skids," which said that in 2009, sports sponsorships dropped by $100 million. Hit particularly hard is motorsports, and not just racers like Buckler: This year, we'll be referring to the NASCAR track in Charlotte, N.C., as Charlotte Motor Speedway instead of Lowe's Motor Speedway. Lowe's sponsorship deal with the track expired and the hardware chain did not renew it.

"I think that sponsorship will be in good shape this year," he says. "Better than last year.

'That said, sponsors are looking for results, a return on investment. If a race team can show a way to give a 125- percent return for the investment, they have a very good chance to attracting sponsorship. The teams have to work harder at keeping the sponsor happy and satisfied."

Just allowing a sponsor put a name on your can isn't enough. Saxton spoke of a deal he helped arrange to have a modular building company called ModSpace, which is new to racing, sponsor a season's worth of racing in the ARCA series for driver Nick Igdalsky. When ARCA arrives in Daytona next weekend, the team will host ModSpace dealers and customers at the race.

It is especially important for teams that land new sponsors to keep them happy — motorsports is a vicious business, and as soon as teams spot a new company name in the paddock, they often go after that sponsor like a shark smelling blood, offering to undercut the deal with the current team.

Tracks and entire sanctioning bodies have been known to court a sponsor — right away from the race team that brought that sponsor into the sport.

Saxton also said that we are likely to see fewer teams with one major sponsor all year, instead relying on multiple smaller sponsors sharing the expense.

"Not that many companies have the budget to finance it all on their own. There is some pretty creative dealing going on to get companies involved — maybe a company will be the primary sponsor for six or eight events, and an associate sponsor for the rest."